Olivia Rodrigo, pop’s brightest new hope, just may be a rock star ahead of sophomore album release

LOS ANGELES – American pop singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo, the bearer of perhaps the most famous driver’s licence in Los Angeles, piloted her black Range Rover to Westwood on a scorching late July afternoon.

Six weeks remained before the release of her second album Guts, and she was racked with anxiety – about finding a spot for her sport utility vehicle.

The car was her dream purchase, her favourite place to listen to music and, yes, she feels guilty about the petrol.

She kept the stereo off as she circled her destination with increasing despair. A woman crossing a narrow street hustled out of Rodrigo’s path as she let out a “Sorry!”, unaware that the apologetic 20-year-old behind the wheel was the youngest artiste to debut atop Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.

When Rodrigo awoke on a January 2021 morning to news that her first single, the octave-climbing weeper Drivers License, had rocketed to No. 1, she knew “nothing would ever be the same”, she said.

One day, she was a Disney actress with powerhouse pipes. The next, she was the promising new voice of her generation – all while she was still a high-school senior living with her parents, and largely under Covid-19 restrictions.

Sour, the album Rodrigo released that May with writing credits on all 11 songs, went four times platinum. Two of its tracks, the bona fide phenomenon Drivers License and the sarcastic kiss-off Good 4 U, crossed that threshold six times over.

She was feted by singers Alanis Morissette and Gwen Stefani, and sang with Billy Joel and Avril Lavigne. Rapper Cardi B gushed about her on Twitter. Halsey sent a cake.

At the 2022 Grammys, three of her seven nominations turned into wins,

including for best new artist.

Embarking on her maiden tour? Watching tabloids diagram her dating history? None of that was easy.

But crafting the follow-up to a smash debut is music’s most daunting crucible, and Rodrigo felt the pressure to make a diamond. Ultimately, she turned to advice she had received from an idol, American singer-songwriter Jack White.

“He wrote me this letter the first time I met him that said, ‘Your only job is to write music that you would want to hear on the radio’,” she recounted over her go-to dinner of salad and fries.

She paused. “I mean, writing songs that you would like to hear on the radio is in fact very hard.”

Songs are only a fraction of the equation. Young women in pop face a dizzying array of pressures: to look a certain way, to compete against one another, to be role models, to project acceptable emotions.

So, it is notable that Rodrigo has largely opted out.

On Guts, due Sept 8 on Geffen, she is simply a rock star.

Her urge to move in a grungier direction took hold as Sour was wrapping up.

Brutal, the last song she wrote for the album with Daniel Nigro, the American producer who has become her creative partner, is a punky eye-roll she turned into her Sour Tour’s opening number.

“It was super heavy when we were rehearsing it,” she said of her live band, whose members are all female or non-binary.

“I remember tears welling up in my eyes and being like, this is so powerful. This is what I wanted to see when I was a girl scrolling YouTube when I was 14.”

When Rodrigo was that age, she was already a working actress, starring in the first of two Disney TV shows (Bizaardvark, 2016 to 2019; and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, 2019 to 2023) that brought her to national attention.

She long had musical ambitions, but the ordinary path for the company’s phenoms – Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera or Justin Timberlake’s gleaming synth-pop and pop-R&B – was not for her.

Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato have indulged their taste for rock, but Rodrigo’s commitment to it is deeply ingrained.

Her musical foundation was built on the 1990s bands her parents loved.

While most of today’s pop is made by committee, she works almost exclusively with Nigro, a one-time frontman of the emo band As Tall As Lions. A few tracks on the new album were recorded live, with a full band.

Writing Guts’ opener All-American B***h, with its fierce dynamics and wry attitude, was an uncorking of emotions that do not often find voice in pop.

“For me, that’s what music is. It’s expressing those feelings that are really hard to externalise, or that you feel aren’t societally acceptable to externalise,” Rodrigo said. “Especially as a girl.”

Although Rodrigo works across genres, Guts leans into rock, which largely receded from the centre of music a decade ago.

As streaming pushed hip-hop, pop and global sounds to new heights, the most innovative and exciting rock has been bubbling beneath the surface, driven largely by young women.

When Rodrigo bounded onstage on tour in a pleated plaid skirt and arm warmers, she drew on a lineage from riot grrrl to early 2000s pop-punk to acts such as Soccer Mommy and boygenius who have been expanding rock’s emotional palette.

Those contemporaries have built cult audiences on the back of growing indie success, but Rodrigo’s stakes are higher: She is Trojan-horsing in rock’s musical brashness and emotional spikiness under the cover of pop stardom.

She said she has “always loved rock music, and always wanted to find a way that I could make it feel like me, and make it feel feminine and still telling a story and having something to say that’s vulnerable and intimate”. NYTIMES